Petite Mort (16 page)

Another month went by. One day Caroline looked in the mirror and saw the delicate point of her wrist emerging from the sleeve of her black dress.

She wrote a letter. A day later the collector sent his apprentice, a scrawny youth whose hands shook as he worked, to wrap up the portrait, and a banker’s draft was made out. It was enough for a passage to Canada, where she could be anyone she chose.

When the picture was packed and tied with string and carried out of the door Caroline went to her room and lay in the dark for several hours.

The following day she caught the train north.

She loaded her small valise onto the rack herself, sat slowly blinking in her seat. Outside, green turned into distant blue: mountains unrolled, whose tops she couldn’t even see, forests of trees that weren’t gummy-leaved or trailing. The gradually lowering temperature left goose pimples along her arm.

Juliette and Adèle
1967

‘The painting meant that much to her? That she’d starve herself to keep it?’

Adèle leans forward. ‘But it wasn’t just a portrait.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It was herself, at her best, in a time where everything seemed possible.’

Her eyes sparkle. She says: ‘Oh yes, Juliette. An object can be a soul.’

Luce and André, i
.

A gallery opening in Montmartre, six years later. The low-ceilinged room is crammed with the rich and the modish, making it difficult to see the pictures on display: but nobody is there for that. The artists huddle resentfully in the corners, smoking; and in another corner, with a private table and a private bottle of champagne, two young women sit, their heads bent close in conversation.

Aurélie has brought Luce to the opening to cheer her up. Success has come at the price of exhaustion; a matinée and an evening show to perform every day for the past three months, leaving Luce wan and on the verge of tears, questioning her career. ‘I can’t remember the lines,’ she will say, distraught in front of the mirror, and Aurélie, never at a loss, has a constant stream of events up her sleeve – shows, galleries, intimate parties – with which to distract her friend.

While Aurélie gets up to fetch more champagne, Luce leans forward in her seat, looking at the room. Without thinking about it, she finds herself studying one picture that is already attracting quite a bit of attention amongst the gallery-goers. Luce feels singled out by the woman subject’s gaze, which seems to be directed at her.

It takes her a while to get across the gallery floor, ignoring the curious stares, but eventually she stands directly in front of the picture. The brass plate says
Unknown Woman in Louisiana
, and there is a guide price for the following day’s auction, hanging on a little paper tag.

Luce notices the woman’s expression: covetous, confident to the point of arrogance, but unfulfilled. There is something missing from the subject, she is certain, and she is so busy wondering what it might be that she does not notice a young man with dark hair cut in a fashionable style entering the gallery, turning the heads of the artists, who know a born model when they see one. He appears to know a few people, but not to want to talk. Then, abruptly, he stops in his tracks, cranes his neck, and heads for the same painting as Luce. The way he elbows his way through the crowd is barely polite. Art lovers edge away from him; a woman whispers to her neighbour that the strange young man looks on the verge of some kind of fit.

André reaches the portrait, and stands next to Luce without appearing to see her, though she notices him; his mouth has opened and his face is grey; he manages to stand for a moment, then teeters.

It is the first time Luce, never a sportswoman, has ever caught anything. To her astonishment the young man is not heavy: his lungs and upper body seem to be made of nothing but the air they hold, and she supports him easily on her forearms, her weight thrown forward over him.

But the pose is too painterly, too perfect, to last, and even as the room’s artists are admiring the late romanticism of the tableau, Luce begins to shake. They hold onto each other for dear life, but the collapse is statuesque.

Aurélie comes forward from the back of the room, the stems of two champagne flutes clutched in one hand.

André and Luce bought the painting of Caroline Durand together that very same evening, as soon as André had come round from his faint. They paid half the money that was expected for the portrait – each haggling with all their charm, breaking down the alarmed dealer’s resistance – then split the price, paying half each, and signed their names next to each
other. They left together, with their first joint purchase held awkwardly between them.

STAGE SIREN ABSCONDS WITH EFFECTS WIZARD: it was all over Paris within the week. Debutantes wept and mothers cursed at André’s unexpected removal from the market.

Luce’s Aunt Berthe returned home that same evening to a venomous little note about the catastrophe from her closest friend. Rushing upstairs, she verified that Luce’s room was indeed empty, and covered her powdered face with her hands.

Towards dawn, Berthe lay staring up at the corniced ceiling of her bedroom; water hissed and boiled overhead, circulating around the pipes of her apartment, and she clenched her fists and boiled too; inside her hair-net, each strand had transformed into an individual snake. There was nothing for it: she rose early and summoned the carriage.

She was forced to admit that the Bois de Boulogne neighbourhood was better than expected. This Durand must have some money. The carriage turned up a long drive and swept to a halt in the turning circle outside the front door. Nevertheless, Berthe tossed her head as she alighted from the carriage, and reached up to knock on the door.

Thirty seconds passed – then a minute. Where were the servants? Berthe had never been ignored on a doorstep before. Then the door opened, and André stood there.

‘Yes?’ he said.

Berthe was fascinated. The man was in his nightshirt.

‘I am Berthe de Jumièges,’ she told him in her woman-about-town voice, and smiled. Usually the name was enough.

André shook his head, smiled and shrugged.

The voice had been designed to reassure:
We are people of the world together
, it said unctuously,
if there is an arrangement, we will be sure to arrive at it, you and I
. Now Berthe felt her courage failing; the nightshirt’s edge twitched in the breeze. What she had come to tell him seemed far away and improbable now, but
she steeled herself and said it anyway: ‘Her aunt. I’ve come to take her home.’

André shrugged again, and smiled.

‘I don’t think she wants to go,’ he said.

A burst of laughter, far back in the shadows of the hallway; and Berthe, peering, saw Luce sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, wrapped only in a sheet.

Berthe tried one final line. ‘Her father is unwell. I have done my best to keep the newspapers out of his reach but there are limits to what I can do, and if he finds out, the scandal will be the death of him.’

André’s expression cooled. ‘It comes to us all in the end.’

Berthe gathered herself. ‘Then I think, I know, I can speak for the family, I can honestly say we wash our hands of her.’

Luce’s stare said:
You did that a long time ago
.

THE MORNING AFTER THE SOIRÉE
, my eyes snap open, recalling what happened. What did happen? We went out for the evening. That’s all.

The red dress is hanging on the back of the door, where I tore it off last night: I take it to the cupboard and push it behind the other dresses, so that it can’t be seen when I open the door. I get dressed quickly, but go downstairs slowly. I will make some breezy remark:
Quite an evening last night! Does your head ache like mine?

But when I get to the study, she is sitting at her desk again, holding a letter up to the light. Her fingers are glowing red where the morning sun shines through them, and what I had planned to say, I forget.

She jumps when she sees me and her hand flies to her hair: ‘Adèle!’ and for a too long, appalling moment I think she is going to say,
About last night
… but she doesn’t; she looks away quickly, back at the letter.

‘Feuillade wants to see me,’ she says. ‘It seems he has something in mind for me, and wants me to visit him this morning and read a piece of my choosing.’

She folds the letter thoughtfully; then darts a quick glance and a small smile at me. ‘Good news, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say, and then: ‘I could come with you.’

She looks at me for a moment; her hand goes to the back of her neck. ‘Oh no, you stay here in the cool. I’ll be back before you know it.’ She looks around the room hurriedly, and her
gaze falls on a stack of correspondence by the sofa. ‘Could you send the money to the manicurist? And sort out the order for my hats?’

Then she gets up and begins to bustle, looking for the things she will take with her to the audition, her back turned.

I watch her go from the study window, the top of her head bobbing. Hubert smiles as he holds the car door open. The angle lets me see her sitting in the cab, grey behind the glass, her hands folded in her lap.

She will be going up the steps to Feuillade’s office, she will be sitting, he will be steepling his fingers and earnestly outlining the proposal; she will be nodding and smiling, a real smile, like the one last night, over her shoulder, as Aurélie dragged her away.

I close my eyes, tired – last night the Erlking galloped white-faced through my dreams – and when I open them, the sun in the room is so strong that it dazzles me; in the shaft of light and the flutter of the drapes I imagine Agathe standing there.

She smirks:
One would say certain things
.

Nonsense
.

You have the signs
.

It’s nothing
.

So last night?

What about last night? It was a soirée between friends
.

Agathe studies her bitten nails.
Friends
. The curtain twitches in the hot breeze and she is gone.

The clatter of the front door, and excited laughter; feet on the stairs and she walks into the room, with Thomas carrying her coat. ‘Imagine!’ she says, ‘he has engaged me as a highway-woman in a big film called
Dick Turpin
! And the best thing, the best thing is that if it’s successful, I am to tour America with it!’

She looks at me, flushed and beaming. ‘America!’ she says.

I am thinking of her far away in a city of electric light. ‘Wouldn’t you have to speak English?’ I have said before I can stop myself.

Her face closes. ‘They will use an interpreter,’ she says. ‘Feuillade said it won’t matter.’

She moves to the desk in the window and rearranges the corners of the stack of read scripts. She has her back to me.

‘What about M. Durand?’

She waves a hand. ‘It might be best to keep it under our hat until the contract is signed.’

The booming silence is back between us.

‘It’ll be our secret,’ she says. Then, when I don’t say anything, she blushes. ‘Why don’t you take the car? Go into the city for the afternoon.’

‘If you want,’ I say.

She doesn’t look at me. She has turned away again, back to the desk.

All that week, I presented myself to her in the study, only to find her hand on the nape of her neck; she was distracted, absorbed in paperwork. ‘You could visit the Jardin des Plantes, and see the leopard,’ she would say, with a smile that seemed wide and flat, like a painting, while she fussed with her hair; or ‘You could fetch my novels from the shop in rue des Ecoles.’

At the earliest possible point, she’d look away, as if I was an embarrassment. I’d turn, go down to the automobile and ask Hubert to drive me into Paris.

Faces were just faces, seen through the car window; or they were grotesques, staring at me as if they knew me, then turning away. In the Jardin des Plantes, I walked to the leopard’s enclosure and found it asleep in the heat, half concealed by the foliage in its cage. The bookshop owner passed me the packet
of new detective novels, and it seemed to me that he wouldn’t look at me, and that he withdrew his hand too quickly from the parcel.

The evenings were the worst. André seemed in a high good humour, cracking his knuckles and eating enormous portions; Luce seemed hectic, brittle, keeping up a constant stream of society chatter to which he listened, for once, with keen interest. ‘This sun will drive us all mad,’ he’d say cheerfully, when she related some idiotic, scandalous tidbit for him.

If I sometimes caught her cool gaze on me, when André was distracted by the butler, I tossed my head, miserable, and would not look at her.
I’ll keep your secret
, I thought,
but that is all
, and hated the quickening feeling in my belly, and hated even more the misery when I looked up and she had looked away.

One night, waiting for André in my room, I heard the roiling slam of thunder and the drumming of water on the leads.

I got up and crossed to the window, throwing it and the shutters wide; a gust of warm rain blew in my face. The sky was a sickened yellow; wind chased a stray newspaper across the terrace, and in the far distance, I could just make out the tree line, bending in the rising gale.

The weather seemed all the more savage in the manicured landscape: I had a satisfying vision of rose petals being strewn across the garden.

‘What a night!’ André was suddenly there, rubbing his hands idiotically as if the weather was his department. ‘Shut the window.’

‘Not yet.’ I wanted to be out in the storm, not in here with him.

‘I said close the shutters.’

‘No.’

He crossed the room and caught at my arm, pulling me
away from the window, stinging my wrist; he leant out and slammed the shutters.

Immediately the room was watchful; too small and hot. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and turned away, tight-lipped, and began to unbutton his shirt, as he did every other night of the week.

I found I was trembling as I watched him. ‘You have got me here under false pretences. You have brought me here as your concubine.’